Ok, so you’ve got your tools, you’ve got some lino, you’ve got some spare time, all you need is an image. I chose a photograph I took during the recent snowfalls.

On the first night it started snowing there was a bizarre light in the sky – I couldn’t work it out at first andwhen I stepped outside it freaked me out, the sky was glowing with an otherworldly orange hue and it was so bright that I could easily see my way around the garden, like the sun at dusk.Here’s a photo from the garden:

This was obviously quite a long exposure (1 second), but it did not actually look much different to this by eye. Here’s an image taken at the same time using flash, just to prove it was actually at night:

The flash makes it look really dark, like a normal night, but it really wasn’t.

The sky glow came back every night for the next few days, prompting Polly to suggest that something weird had happened in space, something apocalyptic. Luckily it turns out that it happens because the snow hanging in the air becomes illuminated by all the street and house lights in the city. Even knowing this, it was pretty amazing, and it’s insane to be able to see just how much light our cities throw up into the air. Check out this comparison view of the stars from a rural spot (top) and a metropolitan area (bottom):

I seem to remember that Northumberland apparently has the darkest night sky in England if you were wondering. I also seem to remember that different countries adopt different technologies for their street lighting, so if you look at Britain from above, you’ll see an old fashioned orange sodium glow, whereas the Japanese will see the cool blue-white glow of metal-halide and LED lamps.

Anyway, I digress as always. Once you have your image/design, you’ll have to work out a way of transferring it onto the lino.You need to bear in mind when you do this that your image will be printed backwards horizontally, so if you want it the right way round or you’re printing text, you need to draw it backwards on the lino.

There are various methods to do this:

-photocopy transfer: print your image out, photocopy it, then, as soon as possible, place it face down onto the lino and rub the back with cotton wool soaked in nail polish remover or paint thinner (the crucial ingredient is Acetone, which loosens the toner from the paper). I tried this but I think the photocopy was too old because it didn’t work at all. I have done it successfully in the past though, it just depends whether you have access to a photocopier really.

-draw it on freehand: pretty obvious really, just watch out because if you do it with certain pens (especially Sharpies) the ink may transfer onto the paper while printing.

-graphite paper: this is just a sheet of paper covered in graphite, which you place under your image, then draw over the top, which transfers the graphite from the paper to the lino.

I used a mixture of the second and third methods, except I’m too cheap to buy graphite paper, especially considering that you can make your own in about 30 seconds.

Take your printed image, and scribble all over the back of the paper with a graphite stick or soft pencil:

Place it face up into the lino and draw firmly over your image (its a good idea to blu-tack it down), and just like magic there it is:

I finished drawing in the details freehand, and then went over some of it with a biro because I kept smudging it all over the damn place.

Now the cutting/printing process… there are two basic different methods to multi-colour relief printing. The traditional woodblock method is to carve a key block (black outlines of the image), then use that template to carve a different block for every separate colour. This process is, in many ways, a massive pain in the arse, but does give complete flexibility over each colour and enables loads of sophisticated blending effects and blah blah blah etc. Far more common in lino circles is the reduction process, in which you use one block and gradually cut away more and more with each colour printed. It’s kinda hard to explain so I’ll just go through what I did.

First of all, you want to cut away the parts of the image that you want to be white, or rather, the colour of the paper you’re printing on. If the lino is hard to cut, stick it on a hotplate/top of the boiler/toaster or whatever for a minute just to warm it up a bit, which makes it a lot softer. Remember to always cut away from your hands otherwise in no time you’ll be haemorrhaging like a haemophiliac in a Brazilian police shoot-out.

Here’s mine with the white bits removed (just some of the sky):

Now you need to make some sort of registration method to ensure that all your colours line up perfectly. If you’re using a press you can generally just lay the lino face down onto the paper and line it up by sight, but when hand pulling (referring to printing – not bashing waist, wrestling with the bald champ, hand-to-gland combat, battling the purple headed yoghurt slinger, combing the hair of your bald pig sally, going Hans Solo on Darth Vader’s head, or whatever you sick filth-peddlers had in mind) it can be tricky.

Here’s my rock-solid method:

Put your lino on a table top and secure it in place with some bits of wood or cardboard taped down at the corners.

Place the paper on top of the lino, making sure it’s centrally placed (measure that shit) and then make little corner things for the corners of the paper and tape them down. This will basically be enough to get them in the right place, but I went a step further and put some pins through the corners of the lino and put the paper on top so it gets punctured, this way I know the paper will be lined up perfectly every time just by fitting it back onto the pins. Of course this means that you end up with four holes in your finished prints, but its a small price to pay for stress-free registration.

It’s crucial you get the registration right because if you mess up with one of the later colours you’ve just ruined the whole thing and you can never redo it because you’ve cut away all the previous cuts you did on the lino (this begins to explain why a reduction lino print is also known as a Suicide print). This is why you should do more prints than you want to end up with because as a rule you’ll always mess up at least one or two.

Now we can go ahead and mix the first colour. The most important thing to remember with the reduction process is that the order in which you have to print the colours has to be from light to dark; you print the light colours first, and the dark ones over the top. Obviously if you try and print light yellow over the top of dark blue, you ain’t goin anywhere.

Mix up the ink and roll out a small amount of it onto a sheet of glass using the brayer. You can tell when its ready to roll onto the lino from the texture of the rolled ink, which should be smooth and not too sticky, using too much ink will give an unpleasant texture on the paper and can fill in some of the smaller cuts you’ve made – bad.

Roll the ink onto the lino. Generally you want to cover the whole lino with ink, but if only a certain portion of the print is going to be that colour in the end, you can save ink and just roll that part of the lino:

Now place your paper on top, grab a spoon or baren, and rub a dub. You have to press pretty hard, and with a spoon it will likely take ages (especially if you’re doing an A3 sized print like I was), but no-one said it was gonna be easy, so just man up and work up a sweat.

Here’s the first colour printed, you can see the bits I cut away have remained papery white:

You can also seen where the sharpie has come through and left black outlines, luckily it doesn’t matter in this case because these bits will be black anyway.

Now you just have to clean up your lino with a damp cloth and tissue (don’t get the backing too wet because it could buckle or bend) and then cut the next layer. This time you will be printing another colour over the top of the yellow (or whatever cracker-ass colour you’ve chosen), so you want to carve away all the parts of the image you want to remain yellow. Here’s the second cut/print:

Third:

Fourth:

Fifth:

Sixth: forgot to take photos…

seventh: notice the gradiated ink on the right hand side, from dark blue to green

Eighth – Again forgot to take photos.

Here’s what the final thing looks like, it’s not a great photo of it but you get the idea:

all this probably took a week, maybe a bit less, maybe 5 days, I’m not sure, a while anyway. It’s a really satisfying process though; I prefer it to screen printing because you don’t have to mess with emulsions and chemicals and exposure shizzocks; lino printing is a bit more tangible, and actually far more creative due to the markmarking process of cutting.

I’ll put this edition up on my website so you’ll be able to buy one at mjfchance.co.uk or my Etsy shop. It’s a limited edition of 8 prints, and it’s an A3 sized print on an A2 sized bit of cartridge paper.

Since finishing this edition of prints I’ve been designing some flyers and posters for some upcoming Fat Out shows, and the second issue of FATZINE, which you should definitely check out at fatout.co.uk. I’ll post some flyer designs up soon, but here’s a preview of one of them in progress:

As usual, Lionel Richie leads us forward with a tantalising glimpse of the future: he leans back, grooms his audacious moustache with a lingering, faltering sweep of his tongue, pauses, lets his eyelids close tenderly downward and, with a gradual gathering of the self, exhales smoothly through doughy lips which lovingly intone: ” . . . … lino… . . . “.

Though his message is barely audible, his grubby ink stained fingers truly tell a tale of their own. Each one, besmirched with crimson like a battle weary steed, stagger onwards to raise the standard of their noble art. Steel glints atop the printer’s pike, this hand-held halberd, this formidable blade, this … weapon of inestimable glory. It’s trough is deep, it’s edge keen; forever hungry for the taste of rubbery carnage. The brayer’s roller spins slowly still, as if to will on it’s flagging master, spitting hematic flecks onto folds of white poly-cotton: these are the slacks of a history-maker, patterned with innumerable ink stars, red on white; the trouser-flag of a nation we all may come to find one day, within ourselves.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been doing a lino cut, and will now proceed to explain how it’s done.

First of all, and rather obviously, you need to get hold of the right tools. This is basically what you need to get started:

The bare essentials are: lino cutting tool (handle), at least one blade (reasonably sharp v-shaped ones are the handiest all-rounders), a brayer (ink roller), a piece of lino, and some block printing ink. You can get a kit like this for about 20 quid or less, but it’s certainly worth shelling out a bit more wonga if you plan to do more than just experiment/play around. Luckily I managed to nab some tools and ink from the Bedford School supplies when I went in over christmas with my dad.

The other thing in the picture is called a baren, and is used to burnish (rub) the back of the paper in order to print the image.

In the European tradition, printmakers have usually worked with a press of some kind in order to ensure speed and consistency of prints, but many printmakers today do not have access to a press, which are usually very large and incredibly heavy (some albion presses for instance, which were designed for printing trays of block letters to form newspapers or books) and always expensive. Eastern printmaking tradition has instead favoured a more sensitive and labour-instensive hand printing process, allowing the master printmakers to achieve unbelievably beautiful gradations of colour and tone by subtly altering the pressure applied to the back of the paper (as well using a variety of techniques to ink the block itself.

View of Mount Fuji from Harajuku by Hiroshige, published in 1850

While we were on our way from Nagano to a village in the Japan Alps called Hakuba a couple of years ago, we stopped off for a bit in Obuse, where Hokusai spent some of his final years. Because of this, you can find there the Hokusai-kan, a tiny museum with an impressive collection of prints. I was already familiar with his work, but was blown away by just how incredible these prints are when you can see them up close; such fine detail and sophisticated use of colour. The quality of draughtsmanship and fine, flowing linework is astonishing even before you factor in the fact that these images were carved into a big hard block of wood.

Anyway, the Japanese invented the baren in order to hand pull (print) their images. The traditional baren is made of a disk (itself made from many layers of paper painstakingly glued together), with a coiled rope of bamboo glued on the bottom (to create a strong textured surface) covered with a bamboo sheath (which reduces friction), tied in a loop at the top.

More modern designs either look like the plastic red one in that picture way up there^^ (which is not very good), or this:

which has a teflon-coated rubbing surface and I imagine would be pretty good, but I’m not sure because I can’t afford one right now. For now I use the trusty old spoon instead. I used a normal tablespoon but in the future I’ll probably use a big wooden spoon for extra coverage.

By the way, if you want to know more about the woodblock printing process, check out this site, it shows step by step woodblock printing in all its difficult and lengthy glory.

Luckily, thanks to the enterprising Frederick Walton, we have Linoleum, which brings block printing to the masses and is a piece of piss to carve compared to wood. In the next couple of posts I’ll go through the reduction method of lino printing, but I feel I have rambled for long enough now, so I’ll leave this post simply as an introduction.

It’s about bloody time I put these up really, and I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out.

Here’s the image exposing on the screen:

It’s a pretty big image (almost A2) so I had to get a massive piece of glass to press it down, luckily I managed to get hold of this old coffee table top for only 2 quid, bargain.

Unfortunately, with such a big image, it imperative that the light source is centred above it, and mine was not, which resulted in the near edge being somewhat overexposed, while the rest of it was perfectly done. This meant that some of the detail was lost on the left hand side, so I used some emulsion to paint directly onto the screen. This actually turned out really well, and means that there are some more painterly marks mixed in with the more detailed drawn parts.

It was quite tricky getting an even print on such a big image, but I quite like the fact that each print is slightly different. The black was screen printed over hand painted backgrounds. Check it out (click on images to see them fullsize):

Here’s one of the pieces I’ve done recently, and plan to screen print soon. There’s a bunch of houses near levenshulme station that have been threatened with demolition for months and months now, and have finally been knocked down to make way for new development. The local residents were protesting for some reason, probably because they think traffic will increase or something.

Anyway, the houses came down, and it was pretty amazing to see a couple of houses reduced to rubble. The demolition company just knocked them down with loads of old furniture still in there, so this massive pile of debris had chairs, tables, an armchair or two, an upright piano, picture frames and many other weird broken shapes. Kinda reminded me of Michael Landy’s project a few years ago called Break Down, in which he destroyed all his life possessions, except this is just an every- day kind of identity erasure, executed from without rather than from within.

It definitely made me think about the relative fragility of the houses we live in, which seem such safe refuges, especially at this time of the year. The other houses around seemed to watch warily with lit windows, perhaps angry, full of contempt, or maybe fearful to see one of their kind reduced to dust; the dust of the earth and of the stars that wink knowingly above; the dust of us all.

This time of year definitely draws me towards dusk – whilst summer light brings contrast, texture and vivid colour, winter light is fleeting, and seems always to be retreating away, hidden, just colouring the sky enough to bring out looming silhouettes peopled by hard glints of metal or frost.